Puneite Ashwini Deshpande in top 50 most influential women list

Ashwini Deshpande

Ashwini Deshpande, Founding Member of Association of Designers of India (ADI) and Co-Founder of Pune based Elephant, India’s leading strategic design consultancy has been awarded a place in IMPACT’s 50 Most influential women in media, marketing and advertising.

She has been featured in this prestigious list for the third consecutive time and has been lauded for her award-winning work for national and international brands in automotive, FMCG, healthcare and Media sectors apart from her contribution in creating awareness about the profession and importance of design in business ecosystem.

This list of top 50 Most Influential Women is compiled and curated by the IMPACT Magazine from the exchange4media, an online portal to recognize the efforts of women in media domain whose work on an individual level, not only impacted their organizations but in combination also achieved exceptional results over the last 12 months. This ranking acknowledges the key role played by women in larger industry scenario at national and international level. The sixth edition of IMPACT’s 50 most influential women list was unveiled during a function held in Mumbai recently.

Ashwini who has received 44th position in the list, is the only woman from a non-metro city and is also the only person from the world of design featured in the prestigious rankings this year. Needless to say that she is the only one from Pune to receive this honour. In addition, she has also been appointed as a Grand Jury member for the prestigious, A’ Design Awards in Italy. These awards have received more than 18,000 entries from around 180 nationalities. She has also been awarded with the “Super Woman Award” by Amrutwel Foundation at the hands of Pune’s Mayor Mukta Tilak recently. This was in recognition of the pioneering work done in the field of branding and design at national and international level.

A graduate from the National Institute of Design – Ahmedabad, Ashwini is the Co-Founder of ‘Elephant’ – Indian’s largest independent integrated design consultancy with offices in India and Singapore. She is an active member of Association of Designers of India and Steering Member of the Design Alliance Asia. She mentors start-ups at Pune as a member of advisory board of Centre for Innovation, incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) of IIM Ahmedabad. She has been a jury member on Global ReBrand 100 (USA), Spikes Asia (Singapore), Design for Asia (Hong Kong), Cannes Lions (France) and Design for Change (India) awards.